YouTube Comments Overhauled Again After G+ Move Allows Spam, Bad Links And Ascii Art

ANOTHER YouTube Comments Overhaul

It was only launched two weeks ago but Google have been forced to overhaul their new YouTube comments experience.

The new system was designed to crack down on anonymity by only allowing comments from Google+ accounts which require a full name.

An unintended consequence of the move was an increase in "bad links" and Ascii art - drawings made out of punctuation often pornographic in nature.

"We know the spam issues made it hard to use the new system at first, and we’re excited to see more of you getting involved as we’ve fixed issues. New features like threaded conversations and formatted comments are coming to life, thanks to you and your fans.

"So what's next? We're moving forward with more improvements to help you manage comments on your videos better. Bulk moderation has been a long standing creator request and we'll be releasing tools for that soon. At the same time, we’re also working on improving comment ranking and moderation of old-style comments.

"Thanks for sticking with us."

The origina

l move to tie in comments with G+ proved highly controversial with an online petition against the step gaining nearly 217,000 signatures.

The petition said: "Google is forcing us to make google+ accounts and invading our social life to comment on a youtube video and trying to take away our anonymous profile. They are also trying to censor us unless we share the same worldview as they do."

Some YouTube users boycotted the site by directing video comments offsite to Reddit.

But many welcomed the move insisting it was necessary to help with modernisation as well as improving the profile of Google's struggling social network.

Richard Broughton from the consultants IHS Screen Digest, told the BBC: "Having information about the people who are consuming the videos - thanks to them being linked to a Google+ account - provides an awful lot of information, which is of use to advertisers.

"But making this scale of change to a network that has more than one billion regular users worldwide will inevitably offend or annoy some of them."

Close

What's Hot